The present disclosure relates to food monitoring, and more specifically, to a method and apparatus for measuring the temperature and level of a liquid food in a container.
Many restaurants and food service providers prepare and sell soups. Once the soup is prepared, it is typically stored in bulk in a heated container, such as a soup well which is heated from below or from the sides by steam, hot water, or other methods of heating. Individual portions are then removed from the container over a period of a few hours or longer as customers purchase the portions for consumption.
The soups need close monitoring to ensure safe food temperatures and fill levels, and to ensure availability and prevent burning the bottom of the soup well. Based on federal law and local regulations, the restaurant operators are required to measure all soup temperatures frequently, such as every hour, and record the temperatures, allowing public health officials to inspect current and past measurements. The recording is often done manually by writing in a paper form and then collecting these forms in a file folder. This procedure has numerous drawbacks. For example, restaurant employees may fail to measure and record temperature measurements in a timely or consistent manner. Manual entry is also problematic given the opportunity for error in translation due to sloppy handwriting or misfiling and other human error. Even when performed properly, such manual periodic measurement and recording may miss intermittent temperature fluctuations that occur between recording times.
Certain prior art systems have been developed to monitor soup temperatures. Some of these systems use wireless devices incorporated into a thermometer or other device which is left partially submerged in the soup. Signals output by the wireless device are received by a separate computer and recorded. However, these devices typically only monitor temperature and fail to sense liquid level, or require the addition of complex circuitry, such as separate temperature sensing and level sensing hardware. This adds cost to the system and increases the chance of component failure. In addition, prior art sensing devices which incorporate wireless monitoring depend on battery power to run the sensing device, and thereby require frequent battery changes. Each time the battery is changed, a compartment must be opened within the sensing device, which can allow food or other contamination into the device components, causing failures, and/or allow material within the device to escape and contaminate the soup. Thus, there is a need for improvement in this field.